English
I admire Stefan Zweig for his incredible masculine sensibility, for his overwhelming ability to express women´s feelings in a way that no woman could, and for his mesmerizing writing that makes you travel to the privacy of human beings in perpetual conflict with their obsessions, passions, anxieties and secrets.
Zweig committed suicide in Petropolis in 1942 with his wife, after a life devoted to writing, journalism and translation of other works. He was born in Vienna (1881) and had a Jewish education. He is a classic of German literature, a great genius whose sensibility marked his whole life, all his work and all his readers.
The disappointments of the war
The outbreak of World War represented the end of the humanism for Zweig and at a personal level it was a moment when he fell into a deep depression. Like many artists of his generation, Zweig is deeply scarred by the atrocities in Europe, but with the support of the writer Romain Rolland, he went ahead.
The inhumanity and death prevailing in Europe at the beginning of the century traumatize Zweig so much that he focuses his attention on the search of human feelings. He gets into the souls of his characters, travelling through Europe and India, he becomes friends with Sigmund Freud, he translates Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Keats…
He wrote some poems, theatres, plays, and especially short stories such as Amok (1922), 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1927)…
The female characters of Zweig
In Zweig´s works, the action is not based on facts, but on the character’s feelings, where no one can access them. With him, we enter intimate areas where women fall in love with unknown men that leave everything, hide everything or reveal all.
We discover the contradictions of exemplary women from high society, who are transformed into heroines of their own conflicts from one day to the other. Human sensitivity would be the more present subject in Zweig’s work. He depicts how we can fall victims to the passions of the life, how a casual meeting can transform us, how the events impact us…
Zweig will not resist the Second World War. His disappointment is such that he flees to Brazil with his wife, where they committed suicide together. His last work, unfinished, is an autobiography called Navigators of the Ancient World, and it was a hymn to the European culture he considered lost.
We recommend you read one of his novels; they are short and so exciting that you’ll end up in a trip. On your way to Vienna, for example. This is the land of Stefan Zweig, where you will spend an unforgettable stay by renting Apartments in Vienna.
